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February 5, 2009

Antarctic krill

WHOI/MIT Joint Program graduate student Andrew McDonnell captured this image of an Antarctic krill during the first of two month-long cruises off of the West Antarctic Peninsula during the Austral Summer of 2009. WHOI Senior Scientist Ken Buesseler and McDonnell are on the cruise to study the ocean's biological pump in which phytoplankton, microbes, and zooplankton create and control the flux of sinking particulate matter from the surface waters and into the deep. The project, funded in part by the Access to the Sea Program and the Coastal Ocean Institute, utilizes a variety of techniques to probe the workings of these processes, including a video plankton recorder to snap thousands of underwater images, which are analyzed onboard the ship to quantify and identify the distributions of particles throughout the water column.
(Photo by Andrew McDonnell, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)